Yesterday afternoon I went straight from work to pick up our brand new Ford Focus. Ain't she lovely? We got an amazing deal, with lots of nice extras: 5-year guarantee, cruise control, assisted parking, and even though I ordered a 100HP, we got a 125HP for the same price.

There is a before, and an after. (In these photos, she's looking pretty chipper. I promise you that last night was horrible for her - woken up every hour, not allowed to eat. You wonder about the angels' priorities...)

Between two long train journeys, this text seems appropriate. Written somewhere in France, on a train, between '94 and '98:A head full of thoughts.I do not know why this happens to me on trains. When you're in a car you have to look in front and be careful. On the train you can’t see ahead and there are no choices to make; the route is already mapped out, even the driver only has one way he can go.

Our future being in the hands of someone else, we are free to let our attention wander to the now we can see out the window. Fields, trees, houses, cows, valleys, hills, all flashing past.

I love trees: we have them in England too, but not as many. In the countryside farmers went crazy with productivity - an idol that devours everything. They cut down all the trees to gain those few extra yards. And now our countryside shivers, naked. Nothing protects the soil and crops from the wind. The birds which previously ate all the insects have nowhere to nest. And the farmers are regulated by quotas - with perfect efficiency, no doubt.

The strongest feeling evoked is that of how finite we are, in time and space. At the entrance of a village I see an old granite house, with a slate roof. There is a garden with an old wreck of a car gently rotting beside a crumbling shed. Amid rows of lettuce and leeks, an old lady in an apron slowly hoes. Maybe she’s lived there for a long time. It is here that she came with her husband after their marriage, all those years ago. It is here that their three daughters and son were born. This is where she chose to stay after the death of her husband, rather than going to live with one of the children. Here she tends her vegetables, and her memories. Here she awaits death without fear, but always hoping that it will hold off until after the children’s next visit, on Wednesday afternoons. This is all her life, the centre of her universe, and I pass it in the blink of an eye. For a second my world touches hers, I don’t know her life, I don’t know her name, I will almost certainly never see her again. That house which for me is just another house is home for her.

All of a sudden I feel big and small at the same time. Small because my universe is not the universe, it is just one among all the others. Big because I have been drawn out of my universe, suspended for a moment somewhere where I could see a larger universe, of which mine was just a tiny part.

(How to convey the feeling of thoughts spinning brightly in the air, like a trapped ball at the apex of its flight? Caught out of time, beyond time, silently, infinity... then pulled back into the rhythm and rush of the train's motion.)

In a small town, we go through the station. It is big, old, empty. There’s no one, rust on the rails, grass between the paving slabs. On a shed with peeling paint, a half-detached wooden panel sways in the wind. Once upon a time this place must have been buzzing with life, now it is deserted.

A telephone line joins us by the track. Between each pole it gently dips and rises. I watch carefully because I know that after a while my eyes will no longer see the posts and instead just see a wire soaring and swooping like a thrush. I remember the first time I noticed this in Tunisia. It was on one of those narrow-gauge trains balanced on the rails like a fat woman on high heels, at each bend you fear she will keel over. This is where I met this phone line the first time, and ever since every time I see it, I like to think that it is always the same one, which stretches from one end of the earth to the other.

Off it goes through the fields, jumping hurdles effortlessly, being careful to avoid trees.

The girls playing together (going through a tunnel). Our journey started with a bit of 'excitement' as another family were sat in our places. It turned out they had reserved for the wrong day. But by the time they found somewhere else to sit, we were an hour into the journey...

Rebecca came with me to the restaurant carriage. While I was doing a trip back to our place with plates, the lady offered to look after Rebecca. When I got back she had an enormous smile, and a cup full of jelly babies!

After walking for a while more, the rain got increasingly hard, so we hopped on the old tram that takes tourists round the 'Ring', and did a trip-and-a-half listening to the commentary (you get to keep the in-ear headphones afterwards - terribly wasteful but I suspect cheaper for them than cleaning them). Then we stopped in a rather swish restaurant, where they made the children feel welcome by taking an incredibly long time to serve food (that's my suspicious interpretation anyway...)

Then we carried on walking towards 'Prater' and the Riesenrad. With one member of the family grumbling and mumbling. (I thought wrily to myself that this is destiny visiting itself upon me, and my parents would have had a good chuckle).

There was a kind of permanent fairground around the Riesenrad. In this kind of weather, not the most enticing of places. Beware if you ever go there: there is a mini train ride, which we thought would take us to visit the park. But instead it just took us round the amusement park - half suffocating us with the stench of the exhaust. So basically you pay to be taken round so that your kids then know all the rides to nag you about going on...